Wednesday, December 2, 2009

More mindless rape fear-mongering, and more ways for women to avoid responsibility for their own choices

Drug companies are considering marketing Oxytocin, a natural hormone and neurotransmitter that increases trust and strengthens bonding in personal relationships, but -- gentlemen, adjust your jockstraps and make sure your protective cups are in place because they're about to hurl another one at us -- some scientists "fear that these feelings can be abused . . . [and that] the hormone could be used as a date rape drug by inducing false feelings of security." See here.

Sigh. Where does it end? Seriously. Where does the Chicken Little, fear-mongering, lock-the-doors-and-hide-the-daughters rape hysteria end?

Want to know the truth about the date rape drug hysteria? It's a myth -- but it's a myth that young women have added to their rape "facts" catalog because it's a way of avoiding personal responsibility for their own choices to drink to excess. See this piece from The New York Times website: “'Young women appear to be displacing their anxieties about the consequences of consuming what is in the bottle on to rumors of what could be put there by someone else . . . .'” Use of the date rape drug is extremely rare -- false claims among women who report they've been slipped a date rape drug are now widely accepted to far outnumber claims that are factual. Sorry, feminsts. That's a fact. The latest studies also confirm what we've known to be true just from listening to police officers: “Most weekends we . . . have a report from somebody saying their drink has been spiked with rohypnol – while we have had cases where women have been drugged these are extremely rare. We actually have significantly less genuine rape cases than those reported . . . ." See here.

Wait. It's worse than just drinks and Oxytocin. Remember the email that circulated warning women that they should not accept a business card from a man -- because some men supposedly were treating their business cards with a potent date rape drug? That viral email was perhaps the epitome of gender-divisive, high tech fear-mongering -- a modern-day Chicken Little fable for women already overly and irrationally wary of men. Except that instead of shouting, "The sky is falling!" contemporary Chicken Littles are frantically warning women that no man should be presumed trustworthy since too many men supposedly are rapists-in-waiting.

The fact is, it's easier to pretend you've been slipped a date rape drug than to admit you simply regret having had sex the night before. Science tells us that women have far greater remorse after casual sex than men Isn't that something young women should know ahead of time? They aren't taught about remorse because, of course, the entire concept doesn't fit with the female-must-always-be-the-victim metanarrative. Instead of being taught an irrefutable scientific fact, they are taught to fear men, and to suspect that every guy who buys them a drink -- or hands them a business card or suggests they take Oxytocin, for that matter -- is a potential rapist.

The date rape drug myth is wholly consistent with the world view of rape feminists who tout the glories of the "hook up" culture -- so long as no obligations are expected of women. To them it is perfectly justified to say that if both the guy and the girl get drunk and decide, in that drunken state, to have sex, she's a rape victim, and he's a rapist who should go to prison for many years and then be branded as a sex offender for the rest of life and be forced to live under a bridge.

That's called "empowerment" in the feminist world.

When will it end? It won't, so long as feminists insist that a gender-politiczed ideology trumps facts; that mantras they've manufactured from whole cloth have more validity than nuance grounded in reality; that men are evil and women have a monopoly on virtue.

My question is this: why stop at refusing to market a natural hormone on account of the fact it could be abused by evil rapists? Penises are abused by evil rapists. Why are men, in general, allowed to keep theirs?